Brough's writings on the technology, economic and social issues of communications at the intersection of the Internet, telecom and mobility.

March 03, 2009

More cloud-based telephony services

One thing (of many) that struck me during this morning's session at eComm 2009 was multiple companies going after cloud-based communications platform services. Three which had their public launch announcements today were Grid.com, Tropo.com from Voxeo and Mobivox. They're not the first to tackle this area and they each have a somewhat different focus, but there's a clear interest in producing Web 2.0 service platforms that developers can use to access communications services without hassle.

Grid.com is from a couple of developers who were frustrated that they could mash up an application quickly but then had to spend months getting SMS short codes and other communications services.

Tropo.com is an offshoot of Voxeo and makes the underlying Voxeo platform services available to Web 2.0 developers.

There is certainly room for someone to get this right. On the other hand, there must be a dozen companies going after portions of this space. The first round were telephony calling platforms like CallFire,Angel.com and five9.com focused on allowing developers to access traditional calling, switching and IVR platforms - call centers and business process automation were early targets. It will be interesting to watch the evolving focus of this new round of entrants.

Comments

I was checking news today about the recent CRM activity being announced by Mobivox. This is a healthy growth towards cloud based communication - Lets see what this new competition among VoIP service providers like Jajah, truphone and vopium will bring in for its users :)